Archive for September 22nd, 2007

Jewish Journal: You wrote in The New Yorker in the spring of 2006 that the United States might not have much more time to focus on Iraq because they had started planning to bomb Iran. That hasn’t happened yet. Do you still think it will?Seymour Hersh At that time it was considered far out. But it’s not anymore. I’m still writing about Iran planning. It is very much on the table. And I can tell you right now that there are many Shia right now in the south of Iraq, in the Maliki party, that believe to the core that America is no longer interested in Iraq, but that everything they are doing now is aimed at the Shia and Iran.

Larry Johnson has excerpts of the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment to the Defense Authorization Act. It declares Iran to be a regional and global threat, that rolling back Iranian influence in Iraq is a vital American interest, that military force is permissible in doing this, that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards are a terrorist group, and that the Department of Treasury should list organizations condemned under United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1737 and 1747 (basically, the Bank Sepah and a number of industrial companies involved in defense work). This amendment would certainly be cited as justification for a declaration of war.

Pat Lang has two posts on the Israeli strike on Syria. The first links to Glenn Kessler, WaPo to say that the satellite imagery used to claim that the site in Syria involved something nucular came from Israel to Stephen Hadley and cronies, who has blocked anyone else in intelligence from seeing it. The second suggests that the strike may be yet another product of the 1% doctrine. Meanwhile The Sunday Times is, according to Haaretz, reporting that an Israeli commando raid seized nuclear material and obtained US approval for the air strike.

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It’s probably not at all this simple (for a contrary view, see Uhler), but a book by Gideon Remez and Isabella Ginor, Foxbats over Dimona, suggests that:

<pContrary to previous interpretations, Ginor and Remez’s book shows that the Six-Day War was the result of a joint Soviet-Arab gambit to provoke Israel into a preemptive attack. The authors reveal how the Soviets received a secret Israeli message indicating that Israel, despite its official ambiguity, was about to acquire nuclear weapons. Determined to destroy Israel’s nuclear program before it could produce an atomic bomb, the Soviets then began preparing for war–well before Moscow accused Israel of offensive intent, the overt trigger of the crisis.

Ginor and Remez’s startling account details how the Soviet-Arab onslaught was to be unleashed once Israel had been drawn into action and was branded as the aggressor. The Soviets had submarine-based nuclear missiles poised for use against Israel in case it already possessed and tried to use an atomic device, and the USSR prepared and actually began a marine landing on Israel’s shores backed by strategic bombers and fighter squadrons. They sent their most advanced, still-secret aircraft, the MiG-25 Foxbat, on provocative sorties over Israel’s Dimona nuclear complex to prepare the planned attack on it, and to scare Israel into making the first strike. It was only the unpredicted devastation of Israel’s response that narrowly thwarted the Soviet design.

I think it’s pretty clear that all sides were spoiling for war. Because the US was tied down in Vietnam– much as it is tied down in Iraq today– the Soviets felt much freer to pursue their interests. According to other material I have posted, Israel had no doubt that it was going to win the war which, if one accepts it, would seriously undercut the thesis of this book. I also find it improbable that the Soviets would imagine they could deploy nuclear force against Israel without provoking massive backlash. And I do not believe that they dispatched marines to land in the Middle East. In the days of Vietnam, the optics would have been disastrous.